A couple of days back news broke that researchers from seven colleges across the United States are working together on an apparently groundbreaking cryptocurrency project which they say will offer scalability beyond anything that bitcoin can offer.

Dubbed Unit-e, the cryptocurrency is the first research movement launched by non-profit Distributed Technology Research, made up of the academics and funded by Pantera Capital Management LP. It is hoped that Unit-e will be able to process up to 10,000 transactions per second. In comparison, Bitcoin is able to manage up to approximately seven per second. The goal is to make sure rapid transactions can be made without removing decentralization, the heart of cryptocurrency and the blockchain itself.

Whilst Unit-e seems like it might have a lot of potentials, its success is by no means guaranteed. It will need to gain traction after it is launched and function well in other areas, including supporting smart contracts.

Layer-two solutions such as the lightning network which allow for small and frequent transactions to happen off-chain before the final totals are added in one go to the network sort of skirt around the problem of block size and speed. But they do not solve it and have their own problems. Without a more comprehensive solution to scalability, a network’s use-capability will only reach a certain size and will always limit its ability to become a really usable network.

One of the scientists working at DTR, Pramod Viswanath said:

“Bitcoin has shown us that distributed trust is possible but its just not scaling at a dimension that could make it a truly global everyday money. It was a breakthrough that has the capacity to change human lives but that won’t happen unless the technology can be scaled up.”

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